This, however, was just the start. By partnering with Kinvey Google is able to expand the BaaS options layered on top of its Platform-as-a- Service (PaaS), App Engine.

The new partnership is intended to provide access to advanced BaaS features including security and online-offline caching which will appeal to enterprise developers who need to integrate their organizations’ data and authentication systems into their mobile apps. With Kinvey, Google App Engine will support iOS, Android and HTML 5.

On a blog post announcing the partnership, Kinvey's Annie Bourne, explains the benefits of its BaaS services:

[Formerly] developers had to write the same backend code, over and over, for every mobile app they published. Different developers would write these components in different ways, so recycling code was difficult. So the BaaS industry emerged to create a “middleware for mobile” — unifying the code, making it available to developers in neatly ordered, standardized libraries, that scaled well in the cloud.

So perhaps this marriage of PaaS (App Engine) and BaaS will become the standard way to support mobile from the cloud.